Cristina González Torres - Survey & Alignment engineer

“When you study surveying engineering at university nobody explains to you that working in a particle accelerator is a choice. As a surveyor, I worked a lot in the field, on roads, dams, tunnels or bridges, often outdoors and in a fairly dirty or dusty environment. I worked as a field surveyor on the Geneva-France tramway and I managed large international projects like the first solar power tower plant in South America or the world's first second-generation bioethanol plant in the USA, coordinating people older than myself in a mainly male environment.

Here, it’s on a much smaller scale, the environment is dust-free, sometimes we wear gloves and we align things we can’t see physically moving! High accuracy accelerator alignment is a different world. We align elements in relation to each other with a tolerance of 50 µm or less. 

The accelerator alignment community is relatively small with only around 300 people worldwide. At the ESRF, we are a team of seven people: 1 woman, 6 men. We work with the latest innovations in instrumentation and the highest level of equipment on the market. Sometimes we test new instruments for companies and we collaborate with other institutes like CERN or ALBA to push the field forward. Surveying at the ESRF includes a quantity of maths, mechanics and computing. We calculate a lot and carry out survey measurement adjustments by least squares. I missed working outside at the beginning but the ESRF is on a large campus in a leafy environment and I often go outdoors during the day. I also have the possibility to come to work by bike!

Today, I’m excited about the future of our field, which is moving towards more automation with enhanced reality and 3D environmental scanners that use spatial grids.”

Cristina González Torres grew up in Jaén in Spain where she studied Surveying Engineering before obtaining a degree in Geomatics and Cartography in León (Spain). She worked on major construction projects in Chile, the United States and, lately, in Paris and Annemasse, France. She joined the ESRF in 2019 for the EBS – Extremely Brilliant Source - facility upgrade.

Top image: Cristina Gonzalez Torres with an alignment tower outside the main entrance to the ESRF. @ESRF/K. COLVIN